It is not like we have a choice. The power company is replacing old meters and eliminating meter reader jobs.

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I was comically entertaining the idea of constructing a faraday cage around my meter and see what happens. I wonder if they would come out and investigate it or what. My guess is that they would try to accuse me of tampering with it, to which I would reply "I didn't tamper with it; heck, I never even touched the thing!". They really wouldn't be able to argue that.

I think the message in the video has gone way past the point of paranoia. They can tell if I am using my electric toothbrush? Get real. If you want to stop invasion of privacy then you have to stop using credit cards, air miles, Facebook, Google and all of the internet. Just about every piece of your identity is already online, like it or not.

Apart from the people who do the reading and loose their jobs, what else is the disadvantage of having this device at home? (That's bad enough, I know)
Also, as far as I remember the smart meters they want to install here are not even manufactured here, so they couldn't say it has benefits for local economy.

But I don't see why it would be called "spying" if the power company monitors individual electric energy consumption.

Apart from the people who do the reading and loose their jobs, what else is the disadvantage of having this device at home? (That's bad enough, I know)
Also, as far as I remember the smart meters they want to install here are not even manufactured here, so they couldn't say it has benefits for local economy.

But I don't see why it would be called "spying" if the power company monitors individual electric energy consumption.

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So far it's been an advantage to me. They send me weekly emails that tell me how inefficient I am, and I can log in each day and see what a worse steward of electricity I am than my neighbors:

So far it's all good, but next year when I start up my indoor pot farm and my black market weapons trading website server, it might pose a problem.

Have I left an easy-to-follow trail of evidence that leads to the conclusion that I am an "against the grain" type of guy?

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No, but maybe as the guy that won't think twice about the consequences of his actions. I could think of at least three possible bad outcomes of you posting your personal adventures with cars and your electrical bill and so on...

But that's also me getting paranoid, pessimistic and possibly not socially integrable (is the word used correctly?). Meh, each one has his way of thinking things...

We've had a smart meter for about two years now. I do not receive emails but I can go to a website and look back at our power consumption by the hour, day, week, month etc. I can tell when someone has used the clothes dryer when they're not supposed to. Since we now have time of day billing and shifted our heavy power usage to the evenings and weekends our electricity consumption and bills have gone down. And that was the original intent of the smart metering program.